ABSTRACT
In a journal entry written shortly before Sylvie and Bruno (1889) was published, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson described the novel’s history as “one of perpetual oscillation!” (Diaries 8: 488). Dodgson – better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll – was referring to the text’s delayed publication. Yet this exclamatory remark aptly summarises the formal and thematic characteristics of the novel itself. Sylvie and Bruno, together with its sequel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), oscillates between a linear narrative and a disconnected series of episodes, a children’s fairy story and an adult morality tale, and, as this chapter will examine, poetry and prose. In the preface to volume one, Carroll jokingly refers to the text as a work of “litterature” [sic] in order to describe the chaotic assortment of episodes and ideas from which the work took its shape (x). Critics such as Jean Gattégno and Gilles Deleuze have argued, however, that focusing on the fragmentary, disjointed aspects of Sylvie and Bruno may lead us to overlook the novel’s literary cohesion. Deleuze puts forward the Möbius strip and replica of Fortunatus’s Purse that appear in the second volume as fitting emblems of the novel’s coherence (11); “There can be no better way,” Gattégno concurs, “of saying that . . . multiplicity is unity” (173). Indeed, Sylvie and Bruno transitions continually, often imperceptibly, between childand adult-oriented themes – just as one might slide along the non-orientable surface of the Möbius strip and Fortunatus’s legendary purse. But these emblems belie the deliberately discordant aspects of the novel: Carroll often exaggerates the distance between playfulness and piety in order to point a lesson in both morality and taxonomy. The thaumatrope – a nineteenthcentury optical toy in which separate components of a single image are brought together by rotating a disc back and forth – seems a more fitting symbol of the unity of the Sylvie and Bruno books, since that unity is achieved through stark transition and continual exchange between child and adult themes, poetry and prose.
